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5 Reasons You Should Leave GoDaddy (And How)

In the last few years, GoDaddy has come under fire plenty of times – and for plenty of reasons. Not only has the company used sexual advertising several times to promote its services, which has led to backlashseveral times, but in early 2011 then-CEO Bob Parsons killed a wild elephant in Zimbabwe, which many believed was just another sign that the company was willing to engage in unethical practices. (This includes buying domain names users search for and then inflating the value of these domains when users return to purchase them so GoDaddy makes a larger profit on the transaction.) In late 2011, GoDaddy also initially supported SOPA, which also indicated the company was not willing to support its customers freedom of speech and activity on the internet. (GoDaddy reversed their opinion shortly after a call to boycott the company because of this.)

Today, GoDaddy lost control of its services almost entirely, coming under attack by apparently Anonymous (updated: it wasn’t – see below) causing almost every one of its hosted websites to go offline, along with most of GoDaddy’s email service and some of the domains registered through GoDaddy.

Why millions of websites are still hosted with GoDaddy is beyond me, but enough is enough. If you’re ready to leave GoDaddy – whether because of their advertising tactics that they just won’t change, poor judgment by its executive team, unethical business practices, carelessness for its existing customers or inability to control/maintain its own services properly – here are a few great alternatives to register/transfer your domain names and hosting.

Domain Name Registration:

Iwantmyname.com: According to GOOD.com, “this site tries to make the front end as simple as possible,” says Doug Sellers, GOOD’s director of technology. “They make it easy to buy, and the interface is really user-friendly.” Domain names begin at $10 for simple names such as a .com, but can be more expensive if you choose a trendy or custom URL ending (like an .ly).

Gandi.net: While this site’s interface isn’t as simple as Iwantmyname.com, Gandi.net is almost obsessive about privacy. As Sellers says, “It shows you own the site, and are not just renting it from them, very clearly.” Gandi.net also provides hosting at various levels depending on your needs.

Domain Name Service:

DYN.com: After you have registered your domain name, you will want to use a DNS like DYN.com to help you controls the DNS zone and its associated DNS records. DYN, which is used by companies like Trulia, Quora, and Squarespace, also helps power the email associated with your domain.

Hosting:

Dreamhost.com: For those looking for a low-cost alternative to GoDaddy, Dreamhost is a great solution and is optimized for those who primarily use hosting to blog using WordPress. Various levels of service are available, including dedicated servers for those at the enterprise level.

Hostgator.com: Similar to Dreamhost, Hostgator offers several hosting plans with comparable pricing to GoDaddy, but with much less downtime – and less controversy, too.

Though GoDaddy came under pressure when it originally supported SOPA and December 29, 2011 was declared a day for ditch GoDaddy as a result, millions still pay every month for its services. While today’s unacceptable downtime won’t be the last straw for some, it will likely be for many of GoDaddy’s customers – and luckily, there are other several much better alternatives that make it easy for any current GoDaddy customer to leave – now.

UPDATE: On Tuesday morning, Scott Wagner, Go Daddy Interim CEO, updated the press that the “The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.”

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IMHO, I highly doubt this was merely a network related issue. Although that scenario is possible as there have been countless issues with hackers attacking their customers. My firm has helped these clients numerous times in the past when GoDaddy technicians would offer no other solution than to pull an old backup for a charge of $150.

Not to mention the times that attacks have come from within their network of servers. I have contacted their abuse department with all of the attack details only to be ignored with zero response!

Their support technicians who I have spoken on the phone with numerous times have historically been unable to log in to the GoDaddy servers in order to have the ability to truly assist with support. Let me not fail to mention the number of times that they have attempted to up-sell me during support calls for my clients who are located on their equipment. Just look at their login area and at all of the options to add email to accounts which have available accounts already included with the package. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve run into customers who were trying to add an email account to their hosting plan and were confused by this interface which offers addon email packages they simply did not need.

My firm may charge more for hosting, domains, and related services, however, the age old adage, “You get what you pay for” rings true! IMHO, GoDaddy is proof of this.

Could you provide information on how to transfer a site and e-mail hosting via Go Daddy that was purchased through Google? I ended up with a Go Daddy account by buying a domain name and personalized e-mail account through Google. I really dislike Go Daddy’s practices, but don’t know how I would transfer all my personalized domain gmail e-mail to another account. (Sorry if this is obvious, the reason I chose Google is because it seemed simple and I’m not very well versed in these things.)

Hello!? Seriously?! Its just that simple? Just move huh? Just take my website and move it right? Is that what you are saying? So like, where in your simple little explanation to you cover the part about migrating all the existing files over to the new host? Did I miss that? I may have cause I really only skimmed this article cause I’m a bit mad at the moment at GoDaddy. But please, leave the sexist views out of it and stick to the facts. Is GoDaddy a reliable web host or not? Up until just about a few hours ago, the answer was yes. Now it’s no! You tell me how to migrate my entire site, I’ll listen.

It was kellyHclay.com, sorry for the mis-type. –godaddy registered. Also, it’s a little harder to move a registrar than just moving files. They’ll need to approve the registrar change on godaddy’s side. Something that is a real PITA if you’ve been through it before. Godaddy will block it a bunch and then you have to make all your domains public at which point after about a week your domain with transfer. Just moving servers is easier.

I can almost guarantee you all this DDOS stuff is nonsense. GoDaddy has 77 DNS servers registered, I highly doubt Anonymous did anything to them. More likely a mistake or bad update was pushed to these servers and they all crashed.

As far as I can see your domain kellyhclay.com is currently using GoDaddy for DNS services. From what I have heard in the press, today’s attack was not on the actual web hosting infrastructure of GoDaddy, but on their DNS servers, so it would be interesting to see if you noticed any drop in traffic to your site today.